How does a trademark work?

How does trademark infringement work with foreign names?

• I'm not sure I'm phrasing my question appropriately, so please feel free to edit. I recently was reading an article about the Japanese company MobCast and their new product, "Moba Pro Seat." Now, there's another product by DeNA called mobage and with it comes the digital currency, MobaCoins. In Japanese, the Moba is an abbreviation of "mobile", but in English it doesn't bear that connotation, so to the average person, Moba Pro Seat and MobaCoin could seem to be products by the same company. In a foreign language setting (in this case, English as the foreign language), how do laws apply to trademarks of this type? DeNA has a registered US company (and subsidiaries), though at this moment I am not sure MobCast has either. If MobCast were to expand to the US under the same name and sell the same products, are there any grounds for trademark infringement because of the - in English - uniquely sounding "moba" similarity? MobCast bills itself as an "online entertainment platform" providing social game and social media services (Japanese: http://mobcast.co.jp/business/). DeNA is an e-commerce, social gaming company that provides their platform, mobage, to other developers. Again, my apologies if I'm not making myself clear. Please edit and/or ask questions so I can help clarify.

• Answer:

  Trademarks are region specific, so you were right to identify that they would first have to be in competing regions. But there is probably no need to worry in this case. Trademarks are also industry specific. So unless these products are competitors (you didn't say what a Moba Pro Seat is, it sounds like a phone-holder), then they are not infringing on each other. Certainly the restaurant chain Applebees is not worried about being sued by Apple, right? Consider the "i" in iPad and iPhone. You can't trademark just that letter without specifying exact products it is attached to. And thus the iPotty toilet training seat exists (http://ces.cnet.com/8301-34441_1-57563056/ipotty-for-ipad-aims-for-high-tech-toilet-training/). So the same would hold for "moba".